With The 2024 Upfront, Negotiators Are Evaluating Measurement Providers

Heading into the 2024-25 upfront season ad buying season audience measurement continues to be in a state of flux. Prior to the pandemic, Nielsen NLSN with its panel-based methodology had a stranglehold as the widely accepted measurement provider of audiences. For the past three years, Nielsen’s dominant position in audience measurement has been challenged.

In addition, the industry watchdog Media Rating Council (MRC) had temporarily suspended their accreditation for national and local measurement in September 2021. With large data sets from cable boxes and audience content recognition (ACR) from smart TV’s becoming more readily available, newer audience measurement companies using different methodologies emerged. These measurement companies had the support of content providers frustrated with Nielsen’s inability to accurately measure audiences as viewers increasingly watched programming on other platforms.

Heading into next month’s upfront presentations, viewers continue to abandon linear television for streaming video in droves. With Nielsen (begun in 1923), Comscore SCOR (begun in 1998), iSpot (begun in 2012) and VideoAmp (begun in 2014) providing differing sources and methodologies resulting in different audience figures, the metrics used to negotiate advertising time has become more complicated from just a few years ago. The accurate measurement of audiences and data-driven advanced audience are among the primary determinants in setting advertising rates and, as a result, revenue.

With every prominent streaming provider now offering an ad supported tier, eMarketer projects CTV ad spending to surpass $30 billion this year, up 22.4% from 2023. Conversely, ad revenue for linear TV will, at best, be flat. A survey of 370 marketers from advertisers and agencies conducted in January by iSpot, found 68% of advertisers don’t receive data on linear and streaming overlap from streaming partners. Additionally, 78% of advertisers that invest more than $100 million on TV were interested in new currencies, with 23% indicating they were “very interested.”

The measurement providers have all struck agreements with content providers and agencies. For example, VideoAmp has agreements with Paramount PARA Global, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery, Fox and TelevisaUnivision. iSpot has measurement agreements with NBCU, Amazon AMZN and Paramount. Comscore, has measurement agreements with Disney, Fox and TelevisaUnivision. In addition, content providers (and ad agencies) have not dropped Nielsen. Most large agency groups have also have agreements with Nielsen and its rivals. Hence, this upfront measurement provider used by sellers and buyers has become an important decision.

In the months leading up to the upfronts, there have been several announcements on the status of audience measurements.

In March the 4A’s, a trade group representing ad agencies, issued a POV on the status of audience measurement stating the ad industry “is not yet prepared to move to multi-currency national TV demo-based ratings in 2024.” The paper issued several short-term and long-term concerns. Short-term concerns include the constant changes and differences in the methodologies makes it challenging in evaluating each service prior to the upfronts. Also, the time spent evaluating each measurement provider makes it difficult to service their clients’ needs. Among the long-term concerns include the cost incurred by subscribing to multiple audience measurement providers.

In March, Comscore attained accreditation from the MRC for total household and average audience covering both national and local TV measurement. Nielsen, which regained its accreditation status for its national panel-based TV measurement service in April 2023, has yet to regain MRC accreditation for local TV measurement. Heading into the upfronts, Comscore is the lone accredited measurement provider using data from set top boxes and smart TV’s. Comscore is also the only audience measurement provider accredited for local TV.

Earlier this month, the so-called U.S. Joint Industry Committee (JIC) created In January 2023 by Fox, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global, the Video Advertising Bureau and TelevisaUnivision (but not Disney), set a goal of promoting improved audience measurement, granted certification for transacting as a national cross-platform currency for VideoAmp and Comscore. The announcement came one month prior to the upfront presentations. The committee said iSpot will continue to have conditional certification with an evaluation hearing expected in June, when upfront negotiations typically begin. Nielsen opted not to participate in the certification process.

Among the challenges with multi-currencies is the discrepancies found in the audience of similar programming. In most instances, iSpot’s average audience has been running higher than Nielsen’s. For example, for Super Bowl LVIII, iSpot, which released its audience before Nielsen, said second-by-second the big game averaged 126.63 million viewers across linear TV, out-of-home and streaming. On the other hand, Nielsen reported an average audience of 123.7 million viewers.

For the NFL wild card game, exclusively on Peacock last January 13, Ad Age reported iSpot’s average audience was about 20% lower than the 22.8 million from Nielsen. The viewing difference raised the eyebrows of the MRC, which inquired whether Nielsen had used the accredited panel-based methodology. In addition, Peacock, similar to other SVOD providers, has their own internal audience data.

Last fall, prior to the start of Amazon's second season of NFL Thursday Night Football, Nielsen had, in a first, announced they would be including Amazon’s first-party viewing data citing their accuracy. In Amazon’s first season using third-party panel data, Nielsen reported an average 9.6 million viewers for TNF. In contrast, Amazon’s internal audience data measured 11.3 million viewers. After receiving pushback from the broadcast networks (all Nielsen clients), Nielsen backtracked from using Amazon’s first-party data.

Another negotiating tool available for this year’s upfront will be Nielsen's cross-platform measurement product Nielsen ONE is expected to be a negotiating tool during the upfronts. AdExchanger reports Nielsen ONE accesses “big data '' encompassing more than 70 million households from Vizio, Roku, DirecTV, DISH and more recently Comcast CMCSA . Comcast is used as an “impact data” source allowing advertisers to gauge the differences in audiences from their legacy 40,000+ household panel-based with larger datasets.

Nielsen ONE also uses household panels to measure demographics and ensure the accuracy of the larger data sets. Both VideoAmp (from HyphaMetrics and TVision) and iSpot (from TVision) integrate panel-based measurement with their large data sets. The general consensus has the most optimal audience measurement methodology is a viewer-based panel integrated with larger data sets from cable/satellite providers and smart TV’s.

Heading into the upfronts, audience measurement continues to be industry issue. For the most part, many advertisers remain reluctant to negotiate using big data sources. Also, in all probability most ad buying negotiations this Spring will be reliant on audience data from Nielsen.